Isabel Getty had at her disposal everything that can be bought with one of the best-known surnames in the world. On 4 September she married the British financier Faris McKinnon - in a short sleeveless dress that looks more like an evening gown than a wedding dress.

The cut is simple to the extreme: a square neckline front and back, a matching jacket with a slightly raised collar and a small ruffle. The aesthetic is the sixties - Mia Farrow, Audrey Hepburn. Instead of a veil, a Jackie Kennedy-style pillbox hat with a small bow. The only colour is the shoes: satin Manolo Blahnik Hangisi in cobalt blue.

Why heiresses choose simple

This is neither an accidental decision nor a first. Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, Stella McCartney, Lauren Santo Domingo - all chose a dress that looks modest in a photograph but is made with a precision only a designer would recognise. The logic is the reverse of what we expect: when money is not a question, what gets signalled is not wealth but taste.

Here a wedding functions in exactly the opposite way. The dress has to be seen, to be talked about, to leave an impression on the whole hall - because here a wedding is also an event before the community, not only before the two of them. That is not a bad custom; it is a different custom, with a different bill at the end.

Who she actually is

Born in New York in 1993, she is the daughter of Christopher Getty - grandson of the oil magnate J. Paul Getty - and of Pia Miller, daughter of Robert Warren Miller, co-founder of DFS. Her aunt is Marie-Chantal of Greece and her cousin is Olympia of Greece. In other words, two major family lines on the same wedding invitation.

She herself studied at New York University and works as a singer and visual artist - she fronts the London band Jean Marlow, which plays on the border between rock and pop. The couple have a son, Viggo, born in late 2025, who was also at the wedding.

A family with that much history has complete freedom to do whatever it likes - and that is exactly why choosing a short dress says more than any long train.